Events Archive

From our recent intensive in San Francisco

We had a truly exceptional time at our recent social ecology seminar in San Francisco. Thanks to Michelle Glowa and everyone at the California Institute for Integral Studies who made it possible, and to our incredible class of participants from all across North America and around the world! You can view the full schedule, and see that we had a packed 6 days of lectures, discussions, field trips and some fun outings. We had an unprecedented number of participants actively engaged in organizing popular assemblies, from the Pacific Northwest [...]

ISE 2017 Annual Gathering: August 18-20 – Marshfield, VT

The Institute for Social Ecology cordially invites you to attend our Annual Gathering for a weekend of engaging political discussion, great food, and a chance to socialize with other social ecologists and fellow travelers in the beautiful Vermont countryside. The gathering is a unique opportunity to renew the Social Ecology community in person, renew old friendships and make new ones, connecting with like-minded people from around the world.

As the global political wave of right wing populism has caught up to the United States, it is more urgent than ever [...]

ISE faculty and students were key organizers and active participants in the alterglobalization movement. To commemorate the 16th anniversary of the "A16" action in Washington D.C. and the important role played by Social Ecologists in this movement, we're posting the widely-read Bringing Democracy Home pamphlet that helped give the movement its political flavor. Although written 16 years ago, its insights remain as relevant as ever.

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The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:

"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions ofparticipatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.

This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework forcrafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less

Our first online course Ecology, Democracy, Utopia was a great success! In response to high demand we are now offering a self-directed course featuring the same video lectures, readings, and discussion forums but without the fixed time commitment of a weekly seminar. This allows for more flexible pa...

"Bookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In "Ecology of Freedom" (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In "The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship" (1987) and "Urbanisation without Cities" (1992), he proposed "libertarian municipalism" as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel "The Dispossessed" in part on Bookchin’s early work)..." ... See MoreSee Less